Different Emotions: Breguet and Jaeger-LeCoultre in Place Vendôme, Paris

Last week I went to Place Vendôme with a friend, to do a field test for the Management and Emotions class.

The class is really interesting and is focused on the importance of the emotions in the relations with a customer. The application is particularly relevant for luxury brands.

For a team assignment we need to go in twin in a luxury boutique and carefully look at the emotional aspect in the buying process.

We decided to test two theory from the literature:

1. Emotional displays by a service provider vary depending on the customer’s traits, and negative emotions from a customer trigger negative emotions from a service provider (Tan, Foo & Kwek, 2004)
2. A customer’s ability to detect the service provider’s emotional labor strategy will highly impact the customer service experience (Groth, Hennig-Thurau & Walsh, 2009)

To do so we decided to go to Breguet and Jaeger Le-Coultre boutique in Paris, acting in different way:

• I was the passionate guy (it is true and I really like the brands and know some technical characteristics). I acted asking information and showing competence in the field.
• My friend was really disinterested and bored (he fake a bit but essentially it was a true feeling)

The results of the experience was really different in the two shops. I don’t want to generalize and everything is based only on facts happened one day, but I think is interesting as a point to discuss the importance of Emotions in luxury management and in general for every business.

Breguet:

I went into the shop and after looking around for a while a salesperson ask me if I need help. I told him that I cannot afford nothing but that I love the brand and the watches and ask if it was possible to hold in hand ones with a Tourbillon. He immediately invited me to take a seat in the customer space and brought a watch. In the meantime my friend looked around and told him that we have only a short period of time to look at the watch. The salesperson explained the characteristic and let me try the watch (price around 200k). My friend looked more interested after the technical description and I asked to hear a minute-repeater in function. With a lot of enthusiasm he explained the characteristic and engaged both of us in the conversation. After a while I asked for a catalog and exit. Both of us felt joy.

Jaeger Le-Coutre:

This experience is quite different. As soon as we entered a salesperson spoke to us, we acted in the same way as Breguet, explaining that we were not there to buy. I asked to see an ATMOS but she did not understand well the request and propose us a tour to see the collection. She knew very little about watches and was not able to answer to my question appropriately several times. After a while we went upstairs were we saw an entire collection of ATMOS, so I started asking questions, and he called a colleagues for help. We heard him tell her that he was not interested in non-buying customers, but came to us and faked a smile. Both of us at the end felt contempt.

I think it is important clarify something that usually happen more in luxury boutique than in others:

• Usually the goods will be available for years (or decades), so one interested non-customer now will probably become a customer in the future when will have the possibility to afford it
• Generally the boutiques are not crowded and there are free salespersons
• There is a high grade of passion and brand identification involved on the customer side, higher than for consumable goods